November Updates: Manuscript accepted, fellowships turned in, and more.

meganjudkins
Dec 1, 2015
2 min read

I can not believe it is almost December. So much has been going on the last few weeks, but I am happy to report things are slowing down and wraping up at least for the moment. A manuscript that I am an author on was recently accepted. Bat guano was collected from cave sites at different timing intervals to assess how the quality of the digested prey DNA degraded over time. This information will be used to see how often guano needs to be collected for a diet analysis while disturbing the bats the least amount of times as possible. I will post a link to the article as soon as it goes up online. I am still waiting to hear back on the golden eagle genomics manuscript that was submitted last month. Hopefully, we will hear something soon. I have been very busy writing fellowship applications to help cover my last year of my PhD. I am very luckily to have received the Ford Foundation's pre-doctoral fellowship which lasted for three years, but I will complete that fellowship at the end of summer 2016. Hopefully, one of the three fellowships I applied to will come through for my last year.

I gave a talk at OSU's Science Cafe twice this month along with Dr. Jim Lish. The talks aimed to educate the general public about golden eagles and red-tailed hawks, as well as to promote Dr. Lish's new red-tailed hawk book, Winter's Hawk: Red-tails on the Southern Plains. If you have not bought a copy do it right now as it is an amazing book. Both talks went very well and between the two we had over 200 people attend. It was a great night personally for me as I was able to present with Dr. Lish, who I have looked up to for quite some time. I will be talking to Jenk's High School's ornithology class next week about the Grey Snow Eagle House, my research, and how to succeed in college.

The Raptor Reserach Foundations meeting was great as usual. I was able to do a lot of networking to obtain more blood samples, learn where the reintroductions for bald eagles occurred, and I may have some new collaboration projects begin. It is always an interesting feeling presenting research to an audience that consists of people that have been studying eagles for years and years especially when they came up to me afterwards with compliments about my talk. When I got back, I was happy to hear I received a travel award from Zogss (Zoology Graduate Student Society) to help cover part of the expenses for that trip. Thank you to that organization!